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Crushed by the far-right National Rally and the left, President Emmanuel Macron is facing a country that could become ungovernable.
By Roger Cohen
Report from Paris
An has ended in France.
President Emmanuel Macron’s seven-year stranglehold on national politics came to a halt with his party’s crushing defeat in the first round of Sunday’s legislative elections. Not only did he dissolve parliament by calling for an early vote, but he also dissolved the centrist movement known as “Macronism. “”.
The far-right National Rally, by obtaining a third of the votes, did not guarantee an absolute majority in a second circular in six days, it would probably be close. But Macron, taking a risk by calling the election, ended up ensuring that he would be sidelined, with perhaps no more than a third of the seats his party currently holds.
“The resolution to dissolve the National Assembly put an end to the political configuration of the 2017 presidential elections,” said Édouard Philippe, one of Macron’s supporters.
In 2017, Macron, then 39, came to power, eviscerating the center-right Gaullists and center-left Socialists, the pillars of postwar France, in the call for a 21st-century realignment around a pragmatic center. It worked for a while, however, more and more, as Macron failed to form a credible moderate political party, the result was one man and a small circle of allies opposing the extremes of right and left.
This position, which has at times served Macron well, has now collapsed into one of the greatest self-inflicted visual debacles in recent European politics.
Macron did not want to call elections just weeks before the Paris Olympics, despite the fact that the National Rally defeated him in the European parliamentary elections. It is a measure of France’s desperate scenario that a meager Macron victory would now be explained by maintaining the National Rally, led by Marine Le Pen, with an absolute majority in the National Assembly, even if the value of this victory is ungovernable chaos.
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